PARDON ME FOR PREACHING

You don’t go to the movies to learn. You go to be entertained either to be giddy from comedy or moved by drama, but the effect is ephemeral, transitory, unsubstantial.

Even when I see a film that has moved me, I get over it. By the time I arrive home we are talking about other things. That’s most of the time- but just once, it didn't worked that way.

I love movies. I always have. I learned about what I thought was life, life from movies. My earliest heroes were movie heroes. Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, sweeping Olivia de Havilland as Maid Marion, off her feet. In fact, I once thought I would write a book about it. I had the title” Errol Flynn Was My Favourite Actor.” It was to be a book about how an entire generation was socialized by films. We learned to woo like Flynn, smirking, knowing, sexy. or to kiss like Gable or strut like Cagney. They were life lessons.

The book I planned would describe how an entire generation was fueled by what happened on the screen. How to kiss. How to phone for a date. How to dance provocatively. How to hitchhike like Claudette Colbert in "It Happened One Night." The performers were models. The book never got written, although I did write a short column using the Errol Flynn title.

Even pictures that move you Like “Schindler’s List,” where the audience sat numb and speechless when it ended, do not make a lasting impression.

But today I learned something. For years I have tracked my own feelings about gambling, about the thrill of being a high roller at Vegas, about the compulsives who throw away their lives on dice or horses, and even about the apparent ethnic bent reflecting how the otherwise industrious Chinese, seem to be historically drawn to gambling.

Then I saw “21.” The story was not new tome. I had seen the original, a documentary about n MIT professor who trained a group of very bright students to “count” at blackjack and win.

The movie crystallized all my antipathy toward gambling because it focused on the one element (obvious perhaps to you) that had always eluded me: corruption.

Many of the people I know head for Vegas because they love the action. Harmless they say and a lot of fun.

I have always seen it as a far more sinister intrusion on values, values that are discarded at the door of some grotesque imitation of Venice, or Paris, or Egypt. But that is too moralistic because it makes me sound like a holier-than-thou critic.
When I watch the “Ocean” series, what always impresses me is how “cool” the people are. They are in a class of their own, total cool, total luxury, total knowing, total winning. They are the guys who run things.

But it was “21” that exposed for me the underlying tragedy of the Casino culture: corruption. Yes, many of the people who got rich in the beginning of Las Vegas development were innately corrupt – gangsters, hoods, killers, gunsels, and “wise guys.”

But Vegas today, along with every other casino from Monaco (super cool James Bond cool) to Niagara Falls to Atlantic City – exemplify the depths of corruption. Human caring is corrupted. Human resources are corrupted. Minds and hearts are corrupted.

In fact, what I see everywhere around me is gambling. TV commercials by the hundreds selling the “virtue” of getting what you want with a lottery ticket, or leaping joyfully in the air at Casino Rama.

We have created an entire generation of people who have grown up with sanitized, acceptable, socially acclaimed gambling. We have even made winning poker players into rock stars, exalting their “achievement” on world poker tournaments being featured by TV sports channels! When did poker become an athletic competition? We have made it legitimate, like getting a degree in engineering or medicine..

But, as in that movie, one of the only movies I have even seen that left me thinking, I see the corruption. It is a corruption that goes far beyond greed. It is a corruption that goes far beyond entertainment.

It is the height of cool. Everyone wears $2,000 suits. All the woman have huge breasts, All the cars are new and either sporty or stretched, and all the fountains do a dance that makes Versailles fountains look like they dance the polka.

It used to be that it was “If you can make it here – you can make it anywhere.” That referred to New York, where the prize was Pulitzer or Emmy. But corruption has changed the location to Vegas. And “making it” has nothing to do with achievement or brains or hard work.

Nothing more clearly emphasis and puts capital letters on Something For Nothing.

By the way, when I was eight years old and, courtesy of my stars-in-her-eyes mother, attended acting classes, people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Answer: a movie star!